ABSTRACT
According to the Court’s established case law, Article 6 does not prohibit the use of evidence obtained in violation of domestic legislation as such. This does not prevent domestic legislators from introducing exclusionary rules with such effects, of course. Even if evidence has been obtained violating Article 8 of the Convention, for example by using an unlawful listening device, this does not automatically mean that the right to a fair trial would also have been violated. Instead, the Court has adopted criteria similar to those it introduced in its Ibrahim judgment, to make an assessment of the overall fairness if evidence is obtained improperly but none of the rules of evidence discussed earlier apply. Often, the decisive question would seem to be whether the reliability of the impugned evidence has suffered as a result of how it was obtained. The nature and degree of the unlawfulness, on the other hand, would seem to be decisive only if they are particularly serious.
